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Cablevision Sued Over Remote DVR Plan
zoobid writes "NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox have joined together and filed an injunction against Cablevision over their plan to introduce remote DVRs to their customers. 'They argue that while precedent may allow for legal time-shifting among home TV viewers, Cablevision's plans should require a special license from the broadcasters.' Cablevision's plan to create a centrally-hosted DVR was previously covered here on Slashdot."
This is so close to true "tv on demand" that the networks have to be crapping their pants.
How do you justify marking up your "must see tv ads" for those crap shows that you slip between the good shows, if it can be proven that people watch the good shows on a completely different day, and don't watch the crap shows at all? If they have to flat rate, or discount their ads, that'll be a huge chunk of their profit.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
They are worried that it may set a precident of viewers having more control over what they watch! Can you imagine if they had this attitude back when VHS was coming around? Think of all those people that recorded shows instead of watching it at 10:30PM!
Burn karma, burn.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
Maybe one day IT companies will focus on products and services instead of legal activities.
One should wonder how much resources those companies waste in useless legal actions and how much they earn from the same.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
I've long since given up watching anything on broadcast or cable - I just download or buy stuff I'm interested in to watch when I want to. Why the hell I should have to watch things when the cable company or the broadcaster specify and then sit through adverts in content I've supposedly paid for is completely beyond me.
Don't let the networks win this one, or the battle is going to go on for years. Once it has left their antenna, they lose their control over it.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
So let me get this straight... you can use a personal DVR in your home (rented from the cable or dish provider), and record/playback/etc all you want - but to provide the same functionality as an online service is somehow different? I don't get it!
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As has been pointed out here on /. many times before, any industry whose business model relies on controlling the channels of media distribution is now dying a death from obsolescence, thanks to ubiquitous electronic distribution.
This legal move by the networks, which obviously has no customer benefit, is clearly a sign of this malady. We are now seeing more and more suits like this as companies, desperately trying to cling to a failing business model, turn to the law to prop up their house of cards. And it is their last, best hope. The government is quite likely the only organization more resistant to change than the media industries.
The content providers aren't content with ramming broadcast flags down our throats; now they want to mandate the design of every freaking piece of hardware between them and the patsies (i.e., consumers) whom they target. This kind of legalistic BS has to come to a stop.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Although I'm not certain how much is truth and how much legend, I understand that a major hotel chain has been seeking the blessing from the top three or four television networks to "DVR" the major primetime shows and offer them to their guests on a pay-per-view basis.
So imagine arriving late to the hotel the night before to your business meeting and being able to watch 24 in your hotel room 8 hours after it ran.
At issue was getting a revenue-sharing agreement setup between the networks and the hotel. Oh, and coming up with a pricepoint that didn't rape the guests.
Although it may someday come to pass, the greedy networks are the barrier to this kind of Hotel DVR system. So it's of no surprise to me that Cablevision is being sued over essentially the same thing that the hotel chain is too afraid to implement on their own.
The surest sign of intelligent life in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. -- Calvin & Hobbes
While it may seem like playing at semantics, I think they might have a legitimate gripe this time around.
CableVision is literally rebroadcasting their content, which is a major shift from the previous model of 'consumer records it at home'.
Currently, if you want to re-broadcast a show, you have to pay for it. If CableVision goes through with this, it'll seriously dilute the market (in CableVision areas) for re-runs.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
So there I was, with all the hardware necessary for a MythTV box. I thought, "What fun, I can record anything I want, whenever I want, and play it back on my own time". So I set down and got to work. Couple days later, I had it all hooked up to the TV.
And what do I find? There's nothing on TV to watch. I literally spent the afternoon/evening looking for something, anything to record. I still can't find anything worth the harddrive space.
So, I accepted defeat, set it up to record Dora the Explorer and Sesame street ( 2 year old daughter ), and started putting my DVD isos on the harddrive. Might as well savage some use out of it.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Major threats to the industry? I assume they mean the advertising industry...BS. as long as there are products and mediums to advertise on advertisers will make money. God forbid TV isnt as much as a cashcow as it used to be... Do they think they're the only industry that needs to adapt at times? Now they'll start pushing the price of internet advertising (costs associated)and producing commercials to compensate and visually spam more shit on the web. If companies only learned to embrace the future instead of fighting it, they'd be more sucessful and we'd probably be more technologically advanced as a culture.
Walk with Music;
This is the first time that I agree with the entertainment industry on a case like this; if the end user wants to record it, share it with friends, re-watch ot timeshift content, fine BUT this is the cable company cacheeing all content and doing mass redistribution, for profit -- thus it is a commercial enterprise using the content in a way that their license doesnt allow, pretty clear cut to me.
This is just like what MP3.com wanted to do. They wanted to create a centralized music database. Once the program verified that you owned the original CD, it unlocked the music in the database for a user. This was so people could access the music they rightfully owned (supposedly) from anywhere.
And as we all remember, the RIAA destroyed this from ever happening, because they said that MP3.com was essentially profiting of selling their property.
Essentially, Cablevision wants to create a centralized database of all TV programming and "sell it back"
whats so wrong with advertising embedded in TV shows. Why can't Tony Soprano be driving a coke, or eating at a Wendys and commenting how good the sandwich is. I'd much prefer embedded ads then the overt commercials where you have to listen to some jingle or paid spokeperson, those just insult my intelligence. I think they could make more money this way, as it is I don't know anyone in my demographic that doesn't flip the channel when commercials come on.